How To Use Video in Email Marketing Campaigns

I have talked about creating videos for your business and your website in the past here but it’s more important than ever for you to take advantage of video marketing in your business, especially in these tough times. If you’ve got a video clip of one of your customers talking about you, or your product it’s a great way to showcase the video inside your email marketing campaigns and potentially boost response.

Why Embedded Email Still Has Challenges

Embedded email simply put means that when your recipient opens your email, it starts to play. Sounds like a marketing dream come true, doesn’t it? It can play out to be more of a nightmare though since there are many technical issues surrounding embedded video.

First of all, ISPs that you send email through, don’t like to accept video embedded in email. To get around this Anna Yeaman tells us how you can create an animated gif out of your video. However as Mark Brownlow points out it won’t work in Outlook 2007 since it only displays the first frame. Also, there is no audio in an animated gif.

Insert the Image of Your Video

Displaying a video image in your email campaigns can be simple. We’ve heard that when businesses use a graphic of the video clip, then link off to where it’s hosted, whether it’s on YouTube or the business’s website, they’ve increase response to their campaigns.

From a VerticalResponse customer:

“Here’s a stat for you. Using video as part of my last VerticalResponse email campaign QUADRUPLED my click rate. Very powerful and compelling.” David Cleary, www.davidcleary.net

You can either take a screenshot of the beginning of the video and insert the image into your email, or you can use the “embed” code that YouTube provides you and insert it into your email, it has the nifty “play” button already there. That’s how I included our video below in this blog post.

You are right on by recommending that people should incorporate video into their email marketing campaigns. We’ve found that incorporating a link to a video can dramatically improve click rate. But the next step is tracking how the click-throughs interact with the video, just as you’re tracking how your list interacts with the email (open rate, click rate, etc). With video you want to track percent of people that click play, engagement level, and of course total plays.
We’ve found that the tracking the combination of emails and video we can easily determine interest across a list. Here’s an example of how the video tracking can look. http://wistia.com/product/tracking
Full disclosure, I’m a founder at Wistia (the video tracking tool), but don’t let that stop you from checking it out!